The Challenge: Managing Inbound at Scale
Managing inbound talent applications at scale is one of the biggest challenges talent teams, hiring managers, and C-suite leaders face today. The surge in application volumes, coupled with outdated ATS workflows, often forces teams into reactive processes that strain efficiency and create bottlenecks.
Gone are the days when hiring was a slow, deliberate process, with each position receiving just 10–20 resumes. Today, talent teams receive thousands of applications for some opportunities, notably remote roles. Multiply 2,000-5,000 applications by 100+ open roles, and suddenly teams are faced with the overwhelming task of filtering through hundreds of thousands of resumes.
Many applications submitted are irrelevant to the role, poorly formatted, or lack critical information, forcing teams to spend hours manually sifting through applications. The result?
To complicate matters, AI tools now enable candidates to create, tailor, and submit dozens of resumes in a single week, leaving talent teams struggling to identify the best-fit candidates amid the noise.
AI-Powered Talent Management: The Opereta Solution
Opereta, an AI-powered talent management platform, addressed these challenges during a 3-month beta pilot. By automating repetitive tasks, streamlining workflows, and providing actionable insights, Opereta empowered talent teams to shift their focus from inbound screening to strategic outbound hiring.
Here's how Automattic, the technology company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Tumblr that powers 43% of the web, leveraged Opereta to revolutionize their talent acquisition process, shifting from reactive inbound management to strategic outbound hiring.
The Problem at Automattic: Overwhelmed by Inbound Applications
Automattic, the global technology company behind some of the web's most influential platforms, faces unique hiring challenges that match its scale. With over 2,000 employees across 96 countries, the company powers digital experiences for millions of users worldwide through its portfolio of iconic brands:
This diverse portfolio demands equally diverse talent—from engineering and design to customer experience and marketing. Each brand has its own unique requirements, technical complexities, and cultural nuances, making the hiring process particularly challenging.
With thousands of applications pouring in for open roles, the company's existing talent acquisition system faced several big blockers that prevented them from hiring the right candidates at scale:
Inefficiencies in application screening
Talent teams were overwhelmed with the volume of resumes, spending hours manually evaluating candidates.
Limited ATS functionality
Their existing ATS relied on basic keyword matching, making it difficult to identify standout candidates.
Delays in candidate communication
A growing backlog of applications impacted response times and risked losing top talent.
"Our application volumes have been at an all-time high, and we needed a solution to help us process candidates at a new scale." — Julia Callicrate, Hiring Manager at Automattic
The Hiring Bottleneck
Before implementing Opereta, Automattic's talent team faced:
- → Overwhelming volume of applications
- → Manual, time-consuming screening processes
- → Inability to identify quality candidates quickly
- → Growing backlogs of unprocessed applications
The Solution: AI-Powered Candidate Screening with Opereta
Opereta provided a seamless AI-powered platform designed to tackle inbound hiring challenges head-on. The solution included:
Automated Candidate Scoring
Opereta's AI ranked candidates based on their relevance to the role, experience, and skills, significantly reducing time spent on initial screenings.
Comprehensive Candidate Insights
Opereta's AI-generated summaries offered deep insights into candidates' professional achievements, gaps, and overall fit for the role—instantly visible in one central view.
Streamlined Bulk Actions
Bulk rejection tools enabled talent teams to quickly clear backlogs and focus on top-tier candidates while remaining compliant with HR best practices and requirements.
The Platform in Action
Let's take a closer look at how Opereta transforms the talent evaluation process through its intuitive interface and powerful AI capabilities:
1. Intelligent Role Context Capture
Before the screening begins, Opereta's AI engages with hiring teams in natural conversations to understand the nuanced requirements of each role. This interactive dialogue captures crucial context that often exists in hiring managers' minds but never makes it into formal job descriptions - from specific technical expertise levels to cultural dynamics and team fit considerations.
Key Benefits:
- → Captures unwritten requirements and preferences
- → Ensures alignment between hiring teams and AI screening
- → Improves matching accuracy through deeper context
2. Smart Application Review Interface
Our streamlined interface allows talent teams to quickly review and evaluate candidates with AI-powered insights guiding their decisions. The platform enables both individual and batch processing of applications, dramatically reducing time-to-decision.
3. Interactive Career Timeline Analysis
Our innovative timeline feature provides a visual representation of a candidate's career progression, making it easy to understand their professional journey at a glance. Powered by agentic AI web search, the timeline automatically enriches each role with up-to-date company information, market context, and industry insights—eliminating hours of manual research work for hiring teams.
Smart Company Research:
- → Real-time company size, funding, and market position data
- → Industry context and company growth trajectory
- → Automatic updates ensure information stays current
4. Deep Experience Evaluation
When diving deeper into a candidate's background, Opereta provides rich context about their experiences, including detailed company analysis and role-specific achievements. This comprehensive view helps assess not just what a candidate did, but the environment and scale at which they operated.
"Your tool already helped save me so much time because I don't need to look manually for all the information. [It's like] science fiction…but you're doing it right now." — Toto Castiglione, Lead Designer
The Results: Transforming Talent Acquisition
Faster Evaluation
Top Talent Identified
A rare achievement: drastically faster screening while significantly improving hiring quality through instant identification of top talent and richer candidate insights.
- 3 Minutes per candidate review
- 30% Top candidates missed in backlog
- ↓ Limited insights for decisions
- 10.6 Seconds to evaluate each candidate
- 100% Top talent instantly surfaced
- ↑ Rich context for better decisions
Key Impact Areas
Quality of Hire
Non-linear candidate review enables immediate identification and engagement with top talent, preventing the loss of great candidates buried in the queue.
Candidate Experience
Rapid screening enables timely responses to all candidates, enhancing Automattic's employer brand and ensuring positive experiences throughout the process.
Strategic Focus
Teams freed from manual screening can focus on high-value activities: building relationships, developing talent pipelines, and driving strategic hiring initiatives.
Strategic Transformation
The dramatic reduction in screening time enabled a fundamental shift in how Automattic's talent team operates. Instead of being bottlenecked by manual resume review, teams now focus on strategic initiatives that drive real business value:
- → Proactive Talent Engagement: Building relationships with top candidates before they're buried in the queue
- → Enhanced Decision Making: Richer candidate insights enable better hiring decisions
- → Employer Brand Protection: Timely, professional responses to all candidates
"Rather than replacing the human element, Opereta enhances it. By taking the pressure off the backlog, it frees us up to make better decisions and focus on strategic priorities." — Julia Callicrate, Hiring Manager at Automattic
Conclusion: A New Era of AI-Driven Talent Management
For organizations overwhelmed by inbound applications, Opereta offers a transformative solution that empowers talent teams to focus on what truly matters: strategic, proactive hiring.
By combining cutting-edge AI with an intuitive user experience, Opereta enables recruiters and hiring managers to make smarter, faster decisions, ensuring that no great candidate is overlooked.
Opereta's beta pilot with Automattic demonstrated that AI is no longer a tool of the future: it's redefining what talent acquisition can achieve today.